Warren Hinckle III, who died last month in San Francisco, aged 77, was a man of the past. He enjoyed a brief period of national prominence during the late 1960s, when he edited Ramparts, the aggressively leftist monthly. But during the Hinckle ascendancy, his capers and capering—often overdressed in velvet suits and patent-leather dancing shoes, accompanied through his middle and declining years by successive pet basset hounds—were overshadowed by the political provocations to which he was dedicated. Hinckle was, more than usual for the cliché, “larger than life”—great in bulk, massive in his consumption of alcohol, with a black patch over his left eye.
Ramparts had begun as a sedate Roman Catholic arts review, founded in 1962 by a man named Edward Keating. Hinckle, a product of Catholic schools, had left the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution, to work for the San Francisco Chronicle. But he took control of Ramparts in 1964 and transformed its design and content, adopting slick paper, sophisticated graphics, and a hardline stance against American intervention abroad (most notably the war in Vietnam), the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, and other topics considered urgent by the expanding New Left.
Hinckle viewed himself as an important innovator in media, reflected by the title of his 1974 memoir, If You Have a Lemon, Make Lemonade. His standards for comradeship were fluid: Anybody who could make an impression or contribute to Hinckle’s
thirst for attention was welcome to sup with him, and he personally encouraged an impressive number of writers, myself included. Yet he was, in reality, a conservative sort of radical who avoided involvement with ideology in favor of publicity. Notoriety, not facts or provenance, was what counted. He reveled in publishing the diary of Ernesto
“Che” Guevara, composed during Guevara’s fatal adventure in Bolivia and furnished to Hinckle by the Cuban authorities—with a preface by Fidel Castro himself!
Indeed, Cuba became a long-running obsession with Hinckle, since writing about it allowed him to indulge his favorite hatred (the CIA) and project himself as the personification of a journalist defying a powerful, entrenched Establishment. In 1981, almost 20 years after the failed attempt of Cuban exiles to lead an insurrection against the Communist regime, Hinckle published The Fish Is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro. He was equally profuse in presenting readers with conspiracy theories about the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy.
Since dissent remained Hinckle’s public stock in trade, he vacillated politically, turning against then-San Francisco mayor (now senator) Dianne Feinstein in the 1980s when she ordered police raids on sex clubs owned by some Hinckle friends. His will to stray from the San Francisco pattern of political correctness was visible again during the 1988-92 tenure of Mayor Art Agnos, Feinstein’s successor and a predictable member of the liberal Democratic machine that controlled city politics. Dubbing Agnos “Red Art”—in imitation of “Red Ken” Livingstone, the ultraleftist London politician—Hinckle pursued Agnos with such single-minded vehemence that Agnos lost the 1991 election to Frank Jordan, a onetime police chief.
Hinckle went on to create other journalistic enterprises, none of which survived for long. They included a revival of an old San Francisco journal, the Argonaut, which trailed off as yet another muckracking website with few readers and fewer interesting stories. The man who tried to revive the Argonaut, and proceeded from one dive bar or “old-school” restaurant to another, was at heart a nostalgic. He yearned for a past in which San Francisco had a certain glow of wealth and urban excitement, rooted in its location at the western end of the continental United States.
In the end, he looked forward to a burial mass requiring 5 priests—or 10, depending on who tells the story. As it happens, his funeral featured six clerical participants at a lofty, twin-spired Italian church in the North Beach district. Hinckle’s funeral was so elaborate, so pious, and so civic in tone that a visitor might have been astonished to learn the deceased was once considered a subversive figure. Many locals showed up for the off-chance of novelty, but oddities were few: The mass began with a solo rendition of “Danny Boy” by a Hinckle crony in the construction business, and the pallbearers included Hinckle’s basset hound, Toby, who was listed in the program.
The principal eulogy was delivered by Kevin Starr, the historian of California and retired state librarian, who planted Hinckle in the tradition of San Francisco literary journalism, with Mark Twain. But unlike Twain, Hinckle left no enduring works. His genius was for amusement, and it died long before him.
Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
